I share all of the concerns with rampant capitalism that many do, but I actually don't think capitalism is the root cause here. I think the fundamental cause i

I share all of the concerns with rampant capitalism that many do, but I actually don't think capitalism is the root cause here. I think the fundamental cause is societal complexity and the principle-agent problem. One of the most amazing things about the modern world is how we are effectively able to combine the efforts of millions of people across the world to solve problems and build large things. Even something as simple as a banana split is a marvel, with bananas from South America, milk from English cows turned into ice cream in Europe, flavored with vanilla from Madascar, drizzled with chocolate from Africa. That action at a distance is why our quality is life is orders of magnitude better than humans had a few generations ago. But as in software, the cost of abstraction and information hiding is that sometimes information that is important gets obscured. In software, this can mean that an abstraction gets in the way of optimizing for performance metrics you may care about. In society, the abstraction can mean there are externalities to your choices that you are unaware of and wouldn't deliberately opt in to otherwise. But the trade-off, knowing every single externality of every single product you directly or indirectly use, simply doesn't scale. Capitalism exacerbates this because it's a really good mechanism for building complex social interaction structures and automatically routing away from "inefficient" solutions (i.e. ones that do present the consumer with the externalities). But I don't think it's fundamental to capitalism. If we had some other post-capitalistic way to organize human effort at scale, I suspect it will still be susceptible to these problems. What we probably need most is systems intertwined with capitalism that provide the transparency and regulation needed to avoid negative externalities.